Slightly confused about the topic of this thread. My two cents = comparison of one waveform to another waveform.
Suggestion = layered waveforms with opacity controls. Schope can do this in real-time, up to 4 channels and has both a manual freeze function and a peak freeze setting.
Below, you’ll see a kick drum (red waveform) and a snare (white waveform) played at the same time. Snare = zero opacity.
I’d love to see a meta instrument capable of loading sound files from disk. I’ve had to write my own VST plugin to do this, it’s a pain. I mostly use Renoise for live performance processing sound files in real time. I’ve no real use for the pattern editor but if I want to process long sound files I have to split them up and then add them to each pattern. It take forever with a 10 minute piece of audio!
I make music entirely in renoise, and it has everything I need (I think), except what this thread is about. Doing the vocal parts becomes a turn off, when you can’t see anything visually. So I go into the sample editor and cut tiny parts from the beginning of the recording, bit by bit, and try to find a good row to put it. Takes time… pretty awkard and disrupts the workflow.
I don’t have a clever idea on how that would look like. I agree that adding “conventional” daw tools, like piano rolls and what not, isn’t what renoise is about. Maybe like someone suggested, at the bottom. With a marker that follows the active pattern, like the automation has, so you know where to put it horisontally. And/or maybe with some kind of small “summary” of the pattern around/under/over it, so you can easily see where you want it. And when you move the sample back and forth, it automatically moves the note in the pattern. And just thinking out loud, if you want a precise position, you can have automatic pattern commands to the note for delay or something. 
But I guess you’ve thought about this already, and would have implemented it long ago if there was a good and intuitive way.
Well, that’s enough rambling for this year.
I decide to extrapolate the vertical audio track concept a little and project Renoise in the future.
So i made this mockup ^^
2801 
Yep Renoise 3000…
Hmm… I’m kidding 
Audio tracks is the single most important missing feature of Renoise at this moment. Working with hardware synths, guitars, vocals feels awkward and cumbersome.
Having an audio track with the option to select an input source, arm it and record audio to it and perhaps even be able to record from multiple inputs simultaneously (e.g. semi-acoustic guitar input together with a microphone in front of the guitar) would be INCREDIBLY useful. All sequencers implement this functionality. So to ease the pain I’ve tried working with Logic and Renoise through rewire. But it’s way less convenient than having a single integral environment. So in the end it didn’t really feel that good. Oh yes… and if audio tracks with recording will be implemented, please do it with proper handling of audio tails while playback has already stopped (see 6c below).
To make audio tracks really useful for working with hardware synths, a number of issues have to be sorted out:
what range should be played? (e.g. use selection, use pattern or keep playing until stopped manually (space or enter))Most of the items in the list are already implemented in one form or another and should be little effort. In my opinion one of the main challenges is the elegant unification of the concepts of instruments, tracks and audio tracks.
Perhaps there’s a lot more to it than just this list. But it’s a start 
Most of it is rather easy to implement, but hard to design elegantly without making a mess of Renoise its concepts. Be that as it may… Renoise needs a proper answer for audio recording in order to really fully replace a hybrid Logic/Renoise kind of work environment for musicians working with external instruments/vocals. Renoise is already fantastic the way it is, but I would truly love to see this feature implemented.
Can any devs comment on the likeliness of this happening?
Cheers!
Xeryc
Indeed, multiple audio inputs is a big deal if Renoise wants to move into the recording studio market. A drummer alone could easily require 4 or 5 channels. I/O devices with 8/16/32 or whatever number of channels should be supported.
Oh, and time stretch would be awesome!
But yeah; you add simultaneous recording of multiple audio channels/tracks, and Renoise becomes a serious contender in the recording studio space.
Good news:
Renoise already have some “soundtack” handling functionality.
So you can load a 320K stereo Mp3 as a sample right now. (and you can add/compose some extra tracks for this music)
Here is the official Renoise reply about this topic:
"Yes, we have a feature called Autoseek which works exactly the way you want.
You can find it in the Sample Properties:
http://tutorials.renoise.com/wiki/Instrument_Settings#Sample_Properties
When Autoseek is enabled, the sample will automatically seek to the current
position time when you play your song from a later pattern. It introduces a
little bit of extra processing overhead, but if you have a modern CPU then it
should not be a problem."
Ok, it’s not a DAW, but… with “autoseek” you can still do a lot. 
W
I thought autoseek would get much of the way there, however when I tried to do an audiotrack-heavy project, the saving times just got out of hand.
A second issue is that editing/splicing for audio tracks works much better with waveforms. This would be nice to have a solution for, but is not as essential as the saving times issue (and is probably pretty hard - protools and reaper took years to evolve this functionality).
Third issue is that the workflow is just not smooth enough to use as a multitrack recorder. If I’m recording a stack of like 6-10 layers of vocal tracks or violin parts, it’s gets kindof cumbersome to click on autoseek over and over and it would be nice to have more flexibility with recording modes (for example - to be able to record overdubs in a looped fashion quickly or punch in/punch out). You also have to enter in sequencer notes for each of the audio track. I suspect scripting may save the day with some of these workflow issues though…
I have been using Renoise to record my external, MIDI-triggered hardware. In Renoise, I have a separate MIDI and audio track tracks, and when I am done recording a track, I have to turn off the MIDI track and activate the audio track and vice versa to record bits from the hardware. Just sampling a one-shot is sort of out of the question since with single samples you would be missing out on a lot of what makes some of the hardware so interesting. Track grouping has helped a little with recording them but it’s still a bit of a hassle I have been working to get around. The other week I decided to try Reaper (I have never used another DAW other than a tracker) and my mind was blown when I found I could make a midi sequence, arm it, and it would record the track over the midi and even do multiple takes if it was set to loop that section. If Renoise had audio tracks, and was smart about MIDI recording into audio tracks, that would make my whole decade since I could save time and really get my hardware integrated into my setup and I would be so happy. So, so happy.
I’ve made a concerted effort to get into reaper for the audio stuff and I have a hard time with it. The laptop-only workflow isn’t that great (unless I’m missing something). Because keyboard notes double as shortcuts, it’s a constant hassle to switch on and off between the virtual keyboard. I’m constantly switching between the main interface and the modal windows of plugins and “add effects” boxes, constantly right clicking the record button to switch between different modes of recording, draggin the window boundaries around to see the mixer properly…
Then for all its strengths with audio, I can’t even do continuous looped audio overdubs… something I can do with my op-1 and its limited feature set…
I could go on, I think something’s just not clicking. Maybe it’s one of these eureka-moment things. In the meantime, if anyone has tips I’m all ears… and I’ll be waiting for renoise audio tracks
Fucking +1 , this should be visible when autoseek is [ON]
I am not sure if Renoise really needs audio tracks. I would say, at least not until 4.0— Sometimes, a tool, is best when it is, what it is. A tracker, is a tracker, is a tracker. I never used trackers before Renoise, but I love the way Renoise is right now. And, if you put audio tracks, then you need cubase or pt editing capabilities… it becomes a pandoras box. I would say: rewire + make Renoise = Renoise a great TRACKER! and the best it can be.
Hope that makes sense…
sorry, no sire 
a tracker means: sample based music system, and every effort to visualize samples in tracks is it worth to discuss.
than please don’t try to stop developement ^^ you are not forced to use new techniques and tools, and if you have worked only ONE TIME with a DAW which shows samples in a timeline, you would know how naturally it feels to work with them.
and i say that with a tracker composing history since 1993 on c64, amiga, atari and PC.
i also have worked with seqeuncers and duration editors which you even can’t imaginate. they all have big advantages and disadvantages. the most disadvantage of trackers are the bad visualisations of “samplestreams” . (beside the discussion about visualisation of “notestreams”).
goal should be to get the best DAW of all times with editing advantages from all sort of DAW’s, not less! your “argument” remembers me to “good” old times where some peaples really said: splitting the 4 channel trackers from amiga to a 8 channel octatracker is bad because … (low soundquality, worser stereohandlang, bad visibility of all tracks or you must scroll to tracks and …)
I wasn’t trying to, “stop development,” dude… don’t get all whiterabbit on peeps… this isn’t kvr, you don’t have to show how much smarter, cooler, and more intune with music software you are, than I am… using things I can’t even, “imagine,” and what not
I was just saying my opinion… why does everybody have to think the exact same way?
The vertical audio tracks seem kinda hopeless. Just trying to imagine how cumbersome it would be to edit audio in a vertical waveform.
the point is not to edit the audiotracks, its all about visualisation and better orientation with long audioclips/samples.
You’re right. I don’t see an easy way to add waveforms inside a pattern. If we add those waveforms, patterns won’t look like patterns anymore.
And I ask myself : why the hell people want those waveforms ?
The only way to allow users to see and edit the sample that is played in the selected track is to add a sample editor view under the pattern editor view and to synchronize them better. The problem is that ther’s no place anymore in the GUI to do it (this place is taken by the automation tabs, tracks effects, …). So the only one solution I see is to change the orientation of the sample editor, and to put a vertical sample editor next to the pattern editor in a left side pannel.
Synchronisation implies 2 things :
When the song is played, the vertical sample editor automatically displays the sample that is actually played on the selected track in the pattern editor. By this way, people could quicky visualise the default sample waveforms next to pattern content, and easily edit the right waveform at the right time.
For now we use “0S effects”, “Beats”, “Samples” & “Minutes” in the sample editor timeline . BUT, a better correlation between sample edition and pattern lines, could be done if the sample editor timeline also displays “pattern lines”.
i dont think the point is that anyone will have a sampleeditor in the trackview. it more about those mockups
a desired audiotrack format as new channel variation would really do the job.
pvcf, thanx for the mockups, I think I’ve seen them somewhere else (probably in this thread) and I’ve tried to imagine how I could work with these vertical samples inside the patterns. But my real problem, with all this, is not only to see the vertical waveforms and move them up or down, but to “edit” them quickly and efficiently without dropping a second in the workflow. Imagine that I often work my samples with the full features allowed by the sample editor (including slices)… In the mockups you showed, you can select a portion of a vertical sample waveform, but what’s next ? I don’t see any cut/paste, trim, fade in / fade out, crop, auto-dc, reverse, maximaze smooth crossfade loop edition features. The problem with that pretty views, is that you cannot do that much with them excepted moving them up or down… (I guess that people expect from those views something like timestretching) and you don’t really see the related notes, associated pattern effects, and automations. In the end, a pattern cell is rich, and a simple samplewave form doesn’t help that much in terms of edition. Maybe we should add a typical floating toolbar with all those icons, allowing all the known sample edition features when selecting an audiotrack.
I’m not sure if i understand you: did you need a sample view in tracks with a complete sample editor ?
if yes, maybe you could ask the devteam if its possible to “undock” the sample editor ?
for my personal taste the plain optical view of sample is enough, its only for visualizing the sample tracks and arrangements, mainly for longer recording sessions and arrangements. (but for this its important).
